Firewire who invented it

Apple knows that the hardcore Apple loyalists with their firewire cameras and audio mixers and whatnot, will mostly suck it up and buy a pro. The macbook is for the switcher college kids who want to get a free ipod when their parents buy them a computer for school. Why not let the unwashed masses of undiscerning consumers make up the difference with their time? Macs never had RS ports. What they had was RS ports which were used to connect printers and other peripherals, and for LocalTalk.

USB flash drives aka thumb drives will do the job. I tend to agree with Baaker, this is all about lowering the price of the entry-level MacBook and differentiating from the MBP. You actually DID miss one, Audio in. Apple Steve in particular tried to kill the audio in port on the imac and everything else obstensibly because audio was going to go all digital, and anyone wanted an audio in port would be able to get a -crappy- USB dongle.

I think the dropping of firewire at this early point where there is no cardslot to add it for users who need it is almost as bad, if not worse. I applaud apple getting rid of crufty tech, or tech that isnt crufty but on its way…. Nobody cares. Those complaining about the lack of FireWire are probably the same people who still lament the demise of Betamax video recorders. The trouble is, firewire is a very useful technology and is by no means dead like the floppy or the 56k modem.

With the loss of the firewire port here, there is no way to replicate the function that has been lost, even with an adapter. There is no way to easily replicate that on the new macbook. I will mention firewire hard drives here though, which obviously do the same job as a USB2 hard drive and sometimes even both interfaces on the same box but they simply do it better as firewire.

Except for the iBook, which only has USB 1. As for camcorders — well, sorry — but Jobs is right. Almost no new camcorders come with Firewire. You used to want to keep the data on the camera because bulk downloading was too slow and the amount of data was huge relative to the storage at the time.

In an era of USB 2. Or get a modern camcorder first and get used to using USB. And Video-In? It worked, well, and I used it a LOT. Point of order on SCSI. My only concern is the target disk mode function which requires a firewire to firewire connection. And what is the next to go?

Seems that Apple is moving towards universal standards, and commodity hardware. They just do it better. Great to see. As far as target disk mode is concerned, I think the fact that the hard drive is so incredibly easy to remove largely obviates that.

Just remove and pop your drive into an external case of your choice… or straight into your new machine. For as much complaining as everyone is doing, I can say, one, I would never buy a MacBook over a MacBook Pro anyway, and two, it was obvious that FireWire was on its way out even two years ago.

If you have bought a FireWire only drive after , all I can ask is, what were you thinking? I use Firewire exclusively for Target disk mode for which it works very well. In my opinion, this has more to do with the growing relationship between Apple and Intel. USB is an Intel technology as is the current motherboard bus architecture and ram architecture.

Part of the Intel alliance is clearly a preference towards Intel architecture. This makes most sense of all at the CPU and motherboard levels. The old iMacs only had FireWire ports. This drop off of FireWire support is far from subtle. USB is ubiquitous at this point and it better serves their alliance with Intel. They want to steer users to the technology base they most advocate and support.

In my view, that is as it should be. The real issue is apple builds these standards, then charges too much, and no manufactures want to build them into their equipment. If apple was better then it would provide free licenses for the firewire technology, and be glad that it is being accepted industry wide. This reminds me of the aforementioned deletion of SCSI. I owned then and still do a small advertising company. They all connected with SCSI. Now, I was no fan of SCSI, but it was the only show in town so we put up with its sometimes unfathomable idiosyncrasies.

We bought cards to adapt to the old scanners and eventually replaced our expensive scanners with better and cheaper firewire scanners. At the time, it seemed frustrating, but I suspect that Apple was right all along.

Firewire is a must for anyone doing Pro Audio work. I believe Mr. Holtz hit the nail on the head first sentence. Intel Apple.

Sometimes Apple does an amazingly good job of doing away with features. In particular, dropping the family processors for the PowerPC processors. Everything just worked. Apple did reverse one decision that I can specifically think of. As soon as the 2nd generation of MBPs came out, lo and behold, there were both ports again. Can anyone confirm the nVidia chipset supports Firewire? They may have had to remove it to meet other goals, or eliminated it to reduce licensing costs. Most all FireWire devices — even disk devices — operate with FW Faster FireWire?

For BetaMax to win, all of it really needs to substantially beat USB on performance across the board. I would be willing to pay more for this. As for the next technology to go? The XServe has an RS port on it for console access. But FW is by far the most convenient interface for me to use, and combines the right mix of speed and utility. Professional musicians, and quite a few amateurs, use FireWire-based equipment. Video amateurs and professionals alike use FireWire for DV applications.

I think we have to look at the target audience for the MacBook to see why Apple made this decision. For the most part people who are going to be doing serious work will purchase a MacBook Pro. In reality, the loss of the serial ports was a blessing, since the advent of USB on the Mac meant I could run out and buy a USB dongle for my iBook that gave me a 9-pin D-sub serial port very much like the 9-pin D-sub port that used to be on most PCs. If the serial hardware choked for any reason, resetting it was as simple as unplugging the dongle from the USB port, and if I was working on a particular project for any length of time, I could simply leave the dongle attached to the serial cable instead of leaving it attached to my laptop.

Need more serial ports? Buy more dongles. This traffic rarely uses a large amount of processing power, but when the system is already under heavy load, it can get bogged down. FireWire is a hardware-controlled interface, which means that everything going through its ports is handled by an external chip. USB 2. All of that said, I agree that Apple should have left in the FW port on their new products. Cheers, Peter. The baka who made the decision to remove it from the MBPs should be fired.

The Mac Mini also has an RS console port. The ideal serial interface would completely auto-negotiate, in the same manner as Ethernet does at the physical layer.

Meanwhile, technicians will continue to waste countless hours fiddling with adapter cables and breakout boxes. FW is significantly faster, and if you are going to do any real video editing, is an absolute necessity.

Yes, I do video editing on a Mac. I have a iBook 1. And if you happen to have a cheapo camcorder lying around, POW! If it works, it works. I swore never to buy a computer from them again over their nonexistent customer service. I just posted something similar to this on another site, how Apple has a history of killing technology well ahead of the rest of the industry.

However, I believe that the technology Apple subtly announced the death of is….. The Mouse. Apple is making a very bold statement with the new trackpads with no buttons, that the mouse is dead and multi-touch is the future. I expect the next step Apple will make with multi-touch is a desktop version of the trackpad that replaces the mouse.

It would shock the industry, but Apple will again prove to be right and lead the industry in yet another transition. Kinda like USB, right? The problem is this is NOT about technology it is a blatant attempt to force semi pro and pro video and audio users to purchase the massively expensive MacBook Pro.

As if the Macbook is not expensive enough!! Come on Steve …how much does Firewire cost you …. Until FW reappears on the Macbook my dollars stay in my wallet…or maybe they end up at Dell.

Serial port on PCs — as long as routers and other hardware require a serial port to connect at to Baud over serial connection, we will still see serial ports.

Note that a lot of these other technologies were killed nearly simultaneously, when Apple made a stated choice to move toward more industry standard components and technologies to reduce manufacturing costs, where those technologies were equally capable.

One difference is that this is an Apple developed technology that many other manufacturers had adopted. Another point of correction: Serial ports were never used to connect keyboards. PCs had and still have, generally a dedicated keyboard port. The majority of PCs still include an RS port, since the circuitry is in the chipset already whether you use it or not and the connector is cheap. Intel-based Macs probably have the circuitry too, not that they have any use for it when running OS X.

I have many Apple products, but this piece has an echo from the writer being so ensconced between Mr. Jobs cheeks. Quite the crying about apple dropping firewire. If it freaking means that much to you… you get a different one that meets your needs. I was looking to buy a Mac laptop but not any more I guess. The pro world tends to hang onto old technologies for a long, long time.

I work in film editing, and just a couple of weeks ago, I had some data off of a floppy I was given. No kidding. Annoying, perhaps, but people will adapt. At the very least, it would be nice to see eSATA ports built into the pro laptops by now. I remember when Apple dropped the floppy drive from the iMac. Not always one per every machine, but enough to go satisfy the quite evident need for a floppy drive.

So I would say that Apple dropped the floppy drive about years too early for convenience. Still, I think every model should have FireWire. The RS differential made a great RS single ended port by simply connecting the wires to a connector correctly. Round Apple RS to pin mini-D rs cables were on the rack in any decent computer store in their day.

There are no plans to make it work with a Mac. On a home PC, perhaps. Fortunately most vendors still offer at least one portable model with a real serial port. How can they justify getting rid of a vital technology for indie musicians and videomakers? Does anybody at Apple think about how many young creative students rely on Macbooks for their projects?

Which is too bad, and Apple deleting threads about it from the discussion boards is appalling. With a mb video card. If you bought an iBook for the form factor, you would also have the skills required to enable dual monitors.

They said that the PowerPC was fast enough to cover the loss of the DSP, but it really was not for at least a couple years.

Anyways, it does have an ieee port. I did always compile ieee device drivers. A couple of weeks ago I decided to take a closer look at its configuration, in an effort to make the thing boot and run as fast as possible. Sony also pushes it heavily. Having used a mac for years fire wire and usb2. I think the complaining is a little silly. If, for some reason, you really depend on it, why are you so eager to get a new computer?

Does the new Macbook not Pro! View Full Term. By clicking sign up, you agree to receive emails from Techopedia and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. FireWire was commercially released in the mids. LINK and Lynx. It is available in wireless, fiber optic, and coaxial isochronous protocol versions.

By: Dr. By: Kaushik Pal Contributor. Dictionary Dictionary Term of the Day. Random Forest. The guy's complaint being that "I used to tell friends: 'you can easily connect your digital camcorder and edit your own movies! I had almost exactly the same conversation with my own brother, who's considering a MacBook: I had to ask the video question, since people update their camcorders less often than their computers, I think. True, Pure's Flip and the Kodak Zi6 and others do use USB2 - even though it's an inferior method for data transfer compared to Firewire the reasons are complex, but basically USB2 involves the CPU, while FireWire is peer-to-peer, so if you're doing anything at the same time as moving data, Firewire is faster.

Intel dominates in this field; the Intel-backed standard wins. It's a classic case of "good enough" coming through in technology. Apple uses FireWire for other things beside video, including a "Target Disk Mode" that lets you boot from an external FW drive - useful for repairing problems on your main disk from a backup, or transferring data from an old computer to a new one.